The ODI Nodes are an important part of our global network. The last year has seen significant growth: we have welcomed Rio, Devon, Queensland and Athens to the community; our first group of nodes have become ODI registered trainers; our community of nodes have collaborated with us to deliver global projects; and the network is starting to develop commercial products.

This year we are introducing a framework of core activities for our nodes. Our ambition is to scale our existing business models – creating repeatable products and activities – to ensure nodes deliver consistent quality across the network. We have worked closely with our community over the past year and identified the key activities they will develop. The new focus will involve two categories of ODI Nodes:

Network nodes – running meetups, holding meetings, building an individual membership network
* Learning nodes – running courses taught by an accredited trainer to teach local businesses and governments about how to work with open data

Starting the node network

The Open Data Institute (ODI HQ) opened in 2012 to catalyse open data culture in the UK. By 2013, we had received an overwhelming response from international organisations, many of which wanted to set up a local ODI in their own country, city or area. As a response, we collaborated with this community and built the ODI Node network, focussed on creating global impact from open data.

This table shows the focus of each node, for 2015:

Our ODI Node network is demonstrating how open data is helping to solve problems around the world. They are our local partners of choice for innovation projects and each will facilitate networking activities and learning opportunities within their local communities.